How to add social media icons to your Gmail signature

Having social media icons in your email signature is a clever way of linking to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles. But how do you add these icons to your own signature in Gmail? This will guide you thru the process in 3 simple steps.

Gmail will not let you upload images to their servers so you have to do a small workaround to add images to you email signature. You can choose to copy the link to the icons directly from Iconfinder.com, but that is not always good solution since we can’t guarantee that the URLs won’t change at some point.

Our architecture is not built for hosting images with permanent links and sometimes icons are removed from the site. If you buy a premium icon on Iconfinder, the icon without watermarks will only be available to you. Linking to the image on Iconfinder will not work in this case.

Adding images to your signature in Gmail requires more than just copy-pasting the image. Here’s a small guide that will show you how to do it – it only takes 5 minutes to set up.

1. Find social media icons on Iconfinder

The first step is to find a suitable social media icon set on Iconfinder.com. Search for e.g. “facebook” and set the size slider to 0-32px

Click an icon you like. On the icon details page, you’ll find the rest of the icon set below the selected icon.

Download the icons you need by clicking the PNG links. Now the icons are downloaded to your computer.

2. Uploading images to Imgbox

Now we need to upload the icons on Imgbox. Go to imgbox.com. You can use similar services such as Tinypic.com, but this guide uses imgbox.

Click ‘Select files’ and select the first icon on your computer. From the Content Type dropdown, choose “Family safe content”. Leave the rest of the settings to the defaults.

Important: When the file is uploaded, click “Full size” and copy the URL to the image. It’s important that you copy the URL to the file ending with .png or .gif.

3. Adding images to your signature in Gmail

Now we need to add the images from Imgbox to your signature in Gmail. Start by logging in to your Gmail account and click the settings link.

Scroll down to the settings for your signature. Click the Image button above the text area.

Paste the URL to the image in the text field. If you have a correct URL to the image, it should end with .png or .gif. If it doesn’t go back to the step where you copied the URL from Imgbox and make sure that you have clicked “Full size”.

Click OK. The image is now inserted into the signature. We now need to make the image clickable and link to a specific URL.

Select the image like you would select a piece of text.

Click the link button in the menu and paste the URL to your Facebook page.

Click OK to close the window. The icon is now linking to your Facebook page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save changes.

Now the icon is hosted on Imgbox and is linking to you Facebook page. Repeat the process for the rest of the icons you want to use in your signature.

CEO of Iconfinder

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229 Comments

Thank you, thank you, thank you i’ve been wrestling with getting a social icons button bar on my blog for a week now and your post has finally led the way! Lovely and clear and it looks great on my gmail. Thank you so much.

Hi Martin,
I have followed your instructions but my FB icon is not clickable.
When I insert my Facebook URL that I want the FB icon to link to, I actually see the text link appearing next to the FB icon. Please help

Hi,
Thanks very much. The only problem I encountered was the icons looked great when I composed a new mail, but once sent the url of one of the sites was also visible along side the icon. Any idea why? I’ll delete and try again. Awesome tutorial. Concise and to the point. Awesome:)

I did not apply this technique because it seems to me that some recipients will not see the picture, because for safety reasons their email client does not show external pictures.
Doesn’t this concern apply anymore?

Martin, I am at the stage where I have the icons in my gmail signature but no matter what I do I cannot select the image to make it into a hyperlink? Thanks for this as have icons in my desktop email but not my gmail YET.

Till the latest step everything works fine as you describe. Also the Imgbox site works.
However it goes wrong when inserting the links. Although ‘text to display’ is empty it will insert the link as a link in the mail not ‘behind’ the picture of ie. LinkedIn for example.
Can you or anyone else advise me what to do?

I have been trying in the past week to add social media links to my Gmail account but when I copy and paste the image, it doesn’t appear. A grey shade appears even though the link works fine, but when I found your post it led me to resolve the issues and everything looks and works excellent.
Thank you very much.

I am having the same issue as Suzanne ^. The icons are no longer displayed in my Gmail signature even though they were there until a day or two ago. I just sent a test to myself and in viewing Sent emails to past recipients, it only shows the blue boxes with question marks where I placed the icons. How can I fix this? Is this a problem with imgbox as the image host? Your help is greatly appreciated.

It can be a problem with Imgbox. I have read their Terms and conditions and there shouldn’t be an expiry date on the images. But it’s a free service, so I guess we can’t expect that they keep up the images forever. If you want a bullet proof solution you can use Dropbox’s Public folder or pay for a small webserver at a hosting company.

I’ve been able to get all 4 of my social media icons in my signature and it works great! However, when i check this on my phone the format of the four icons are all wrong. They are all above one another rather than being next to each other. Do you know how to fix this?

This works for me but can you help me make my icons smaller? I have already edited them in illustrator and saved them to “tiny size”. Additionally I have selected “smallest” in Gmail. Still, the icons are way too big. Any ideas?

You can do that, but it’s not sure if blog is willing to host the icons for you. Also it’s sort of a security issues. They could choose to replace the images using the same name and you would have whatever image they choose in your emails.

Everything works perfectly. I have played around with it for a week now but when I enter it on and it is in the signature box there is a blue box that is around the icons. I don’t know if this is something from gmail but I cant get the box to leave.

Martin, the Twitter icon shows up in my email signature. But where do I find the URL to paste into the link box to take the clicker to my Twitter account? If I enter twitter.com/ and my Twitter name, that is what shows up next to the icon.

November 2014 here. has Gmail changed up again? i have the icons in my email signature using imgbox like you suggested. My issue is, i click once on the icon, then click on the link icon, enter the link and it puts the link NEXT to my icon instead of making the icon linkable. what am i doing wrong here? thank you.

I was able to upload my 3 icons and they are now in my signature. I followed the instructions on how to add the link to each icon (3 times) and even tested each link (they work) but when I send a test email to myself, I see the icons in the signature but when I click on them nothing happens. Help!

When you download the file off of the icon site, there are multiple sizes to choose from that you can select. You need to click the image you want, and then you will see the sizes. 32×32 or 48×48 are probably what you are looking for.

Excellent tips once I figured out that I could not do this in Chrome. So weird. I’m using Gmail.. anyway, I configured it all following these tips with Firefox works fine. The problem I was running into in Chrome was unable to highlight/select the icon after bringing it over. Firefox it worked like a champ.

Hi Martin! I’m having some difficulty with finding the menu to find the link button and where to past the URL in facebook. This is a copy of the step that I can’t get past. “Click the link button in the menu and paste the URL to your Facebook page”. Need your help Sir!

Thank you for the post, it’s very useful. I have one question: what do you do about attribution? all these icons on the website suggested are free under the Creative Commons license which required attribution to the creator when used. Is there any alternative website that anyone knows of?

Thanks so much for your helpful info. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong but cant work out what.

No trouble pasting icon to signature box in gmail and then linking f/book url, but what comes up is a hyperlink to f/book next to the image. The image remains unclickable. Do you know what I’m doing wrong?

You need to make sure that you use the correct URL when you link the image to a page. (EX.) Using https://instagram.com/ will link you to instagrams homepage whereas using https://instagram.com/daycationdecks/ will link you to your specific page within instagram. To obtain this URL you will need to navigate to your instagram profile page (not just to your news feed). Once you are on your profile page you can then copy the URL in the browser bar and paste that into the link field for the icon in your email signature. Then hit the ‘Test this Link’ button and it should work perfectly.

Hey there- I love this and I DID IT!!! Thanks for the highlight tip, it removed the link. I have a question. When I go to gmail, and email from there, the icons are on my email. However when I’m in my mac email (gmail) and I send an email, the signature with the icons are not there. Please help. I want the icons on both. THANK YOU in advance 🙂 Feeling accomplished. Kristin

A million thanks !!!
Clear, comprehensive and accurate guidance, with accompanying screenshots for added reassurance and direction.
Took me a good while to get the first one done as my google ‘add an image web link box’ was a little reluctant. Wouldn’t have managed at all without your help so am really appreciative.
Thank you for sharing

Hi Martin,
Loved this and everything was going well until the link the URL part. I can’t seem to get it to just show the FB icon without the URL text showing up next to it. It doesn’t seem to want to attach the URL to just the icon?

Thank you for this, was most helpful! At first I was struggling, like most, with just ending up with my text next to the facebook icon, but then, I realised, instead of clicking on it, you highlight it, like you would highlight text & this worked! Brilliant stuff!! 🙂

I was searching for some stylish heavy signature with icon n all. But the first screen shot of your post includes so decent signature that I couldn’t help but copying and implementing something alike. 😛

This is brilliant – thank you so much! I’ve recently taken on the job of looking after social media for a company called Dolphin Swim Australia and am learning as I go along. The instructions you gave were very easy to follow and I was able to produce links to all our social media pages, however I had a problem with FB. When I copied the link for the company (for which I’m an Administrator), it took me to the company FB page, however had my personal FB details on the top bar thereby allowing anyone who clicked on the link to also go to my personal page!

Hi this doesnt seem to be working for me. I have gone through the process of downloading the PNG files but Gmail will not allow me to upload the web address url from tiny pic or imgbox. Its saying that it cant find the url and yes i have use the correct link.

Hey…
I have been trying to add url to the icon in my gmail signature.
Soon after selecting the icon, i added the url as shown in the steps above but my icon is still not clickable:(
I am added the url of a website…
is that the reason of icon remaining not clickable?

It took me a few tries to get this to work. What did the trick was putting a space between the icons. Otherwise, without the spaces it was treating them as all one image. I tried highlighting each images separately several times with no success until I added a space between the icon images.

what am I doing wrong? when I highlight my icon image, and press the link button, it just shows this ‘small -medium – large ‘ box, and won’t let me make a link! It only lets me print out the text to a link, which looks awful, but the icons are not linked. Can you help?

Very well put, thank you. I got to the point of adding the facebook pnp full size and it is a very large icon, much more so than pictured here. Also, I click the icon and then the link button, but it is not impacting the icon and only adding the facebook link written out to my signature? Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thank you so much for making an easy step by step guide to getting my social media Icons & links into my email signature. Got it sorted in no time (once I figured out to highlight the icon like text instead of just clicking on it) thanks to your tutorial!

Hi, thanks for writing this! Everything is fine up until the last step, wherein I link my url to the icon. I have the icon selected as required and when I link it and click ok, the icon completely disappears from my signature. I even tried with both tinypic and imgbox just in case it was an issue with one of those. Has anyone else had this issue and come up with a fix for it? Thanks.

It worked at first, but now the icons appear as question marks….you can click on the question mark and it directs you to the social media page – but the social media icon is just a question mark – so I have four boxes with question marks under my sigature…is this a problem with G mail?

This is so awesome, thank you! I’ve been struggling for ages and it was great to come across this! However, I’ve followed all of your steps to the T, but when it comes to saving my signature it says it’s too long and to shorten it. How can I fix this please? I’ve tried URL shortners etc, but nothing works! I have 4 social media icons to put in, plus our logo.
Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

Thank you for sharing this. Very helpful and all worked fine. But now when I send an email it comes through as if I have attachments, and has this paperclip sign against all my emails. That’s confusing. Is there any way of getting rid of that? Thank you

Great article but I have a quick update. You no longer have to go through the Imgbox of Tinypic step. Once you download the image to your computer from Iconfinder and get it sized the way you want it, you can use the image Upload feature in Google. Settings > General tab > Signature > Insert Image > Add Image > Upload. Just drag the image right into the box. In answer to Ariel’s question, if you can’t find the right image size you can use a simple image editor, such as Paint that is included with Windows, to resize the image and then drag it into the Upload area for the signature. Thanks for the help with adding icons to my signature line. My sig looks much better now!!

Hi I was wondering if you could answer a question of mine….
I am applying to illustration agencies and some will only accept images as attachments, they have said they have a ‘filter system’ where they can see if there are links in your email, if so, they delete your email no questions asked. I just want these icons in my google sig like everyone else, but will these be detected as ‘links’ by the agencies filters?

Your blog is so helpful, but I am still having trouble connecting the dots. IMGBOX is shutting down and won’t allow new users to upload.. Any other thoughts on how I can get this to work? I tried tinypic.com but I must be missing a step. Thanks for any help! Barbara

Thank you so much for this straight forward, simple instruction! I have been going around in circles all day trying to get this job done and finally after reading your information I have successfully added the social media icon to my signature!!! Two big thumbs up!!!